The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is now widely used in many fields, and its convergence was proved when two blocks of variables are alternatively updated. It is strongly desirable and practically valuable to extend the ADMM directly to the case of a multi-block convex minimization problem where its objective function is the sum of more than two separable convex functions. However, the convergence of this extension has been missing for a long time—neither an affirmative convergence proof nor an example showing its divergence is known in the literature. In this paper we give a negative answer to this long-standing open question: The direct extension of ADMM is not necessarily convergent. We present a sufficient condition to ensure the convergence of the direct extension of ADMM, and give an example to show its divergence.

Recent years have witnessed the surge of asynchronous parallel (async-parallel) iterative algorithms due to problems involving very large-scale data and a large number of decision variables. Because of asynchrony, the iterates are computed with outdated information, and the age of the outdated information, which we call delay, is the number of times it has been updated since its creation. Almost all recent works prove convergence under the assumption of a finite maximum delay and set their stepsize parameters accordingly. However, the maximum delay is practically unknown. This paper presents convergence analysis of an async-parallel method from a probabilistic viewpoint, and it allows for large unbounded delays. An explicit formula of stepsize that guarantees convergence is given depending on delays’ statistics. With p+1 identical processors, we empirically measured that delays closely follow the Poisson distribution with parameter p, matching our theoretical model, and thus, the stepsize can be set accordingly. Simulations on both convex and nonconvex optimization problems demonstrate the validness of our analysis and also show that the existing maximum-delay-induced stepsize is too conservative, often slows down the convergence of the algorithm.

It is well known that the nonlinear filtering problem has important applications in both military and civil industries. The central problem of nonlinear filtering is to solve the Duncan-Mortensen-Zakai (DMZ) equation in real time and in a memoryless manner. In this paper, we shall extend the algorithm developed previously by S.-T. Yau and the second author to the most general setting of nonlinear filterings, where the explicit time-dependence is in the drift term, observation term, and the variance of the noises could be a matrix of functions of both time and the states. To preserve the off-line virture of the algorithm, necessary modifications are illustrated clearly. Moreover, it is shown rigorously that the approximated solution obtained by the algorithm converges to the real solution in the $L^1$ sense. And the precise error has been estimated. Finally, the numerical simulation support the feasibility and efficiency of our algorithm.

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